Brewer neighbors oppose sludge spreading plan > Informational meeting set at Pendleton Street School

Brewer residents have organized to oppose a proposed sludge spreading operation in their neighborhood.

Brenda Smith, a Pine Tree Road resident, hopes for a large turnout for a 7 p.m. Wednesday, May 12, meeting at Pendleton Street School to discuss the proposal to spread sewage sludge on a field off Pine Tree Road and the Wiswell Road.

Since the announcement of the city’s plans to spread treated sludge on land within the city limits, Smith says she has tried to get information about the operation. So far it has been slow in coming.

According to Smith, Resources Conservation Services, the firm the city has hired to conduct the operation, gave abutting property owners an Augusta telephone number and address where they could contact the Department of Environmental Protection. When she tried to contact the DEP, she found that the number had been discontinued two years ago.

The objections of property owners differ, said Smith. Some oppose the increased traffic it will bring to the neighborhood, others object to the odor they expect, and still others are worried about contamination of their wells.

Laurie Morris is another Pine Tree Road resident who is not convinced that the operation is safe.

“I just don’t want it here. I’m not sure of what will happen to wells. Then there are the smells, pets going down there. … We have our own wells and septic systems, and this is stuff coming from the waste-water plant and the paper mill. We want some information on what the stuff contains. Who will monitor? Who will be responsible if one of the children is injured by the trucks?” asked Morris.

“All of us have children, and we are concerned about possible health hazards,” said Smith. “They are telling us all the good about the project, but they failed to tell us the bad parts.”

Smith has been instrumental in circulating a petition in the neighborhood requesting a DEP hearing on the issue, but all the signers got was a public information meeting. She said she every resident on the street signed the petition.

“The site is not really accessible,” said Morris. “It will be a problem for us, a nuisance and a health hazard.” She is worried that dioxins might contaminate the sludge.

Smith said she contacted Nick Houtman of the water resources department at the University of Maine and asked him if the operation was something he would want in his back yard. He said he wouldn’t want it.

She said Resource Conservation Services keeps referring to biosolids when what they are really talking about, according to Houtman, is a sludge composed of PCBs, copper, zinc, mercury, lead, nitrogen and phosphorus. If the land is allowed to acidify, the nitrogen could turn to nitrates. Since it is being spread on a hay field, the hay will absorb the heavy metals, said Smith. The deer will eat this hay and the metals will get into the food chain.

Smith maintains that a third of what goes into Brewer sludge comes from Eastern Fine Paper. She said she was told that the inflow from the plant is monitored periodically. She worries that something could go wrong at the manufacturing plant and something could get into the sludge that random monitoring might not detect.

She said she called the Brewer Waste Water Treatment Facility Friday to get a list of all the metals found in the city’s sludge. A worker at the plant wanted to know why she wanted the information. She was told to call back Monday.

Morris said everyone she has spoken with, from the city manager to the city planner and DEP officials, “have been very nice and straightforward. They are not deliberately trying to snowball us.”

Courtesy aside, “we don’t want it,” said Morris. “We’re not getting any benefits. We sent them a petition. That stuff is kind of scary. We don’t want them dumping heavy metals, if they can’t promise us 100 percent that it is OK. We want to know who would be liable for the wells. Brewer? The company? What recourse do we have if our children get sick or run over? We just want people to know this is going on.”